Friday, December 21, 2012

Three interesting design-related happenings in the last couple of days:

1. Adobe has announced that it has acquired Behance, "a leading online social media platform that enables creatives to showcase and share their work." Read the press release from Adobe here, a blog post from David Wadhwani here, and the spin from Behance here. Adobe says that "All Creative Cloud members will soon gain access to the base Behance capabilities (like portfolio creation and community features) while paid Creative Cloud members will also have access to premium capabilities (like Behance ProSite)."

2. Adobe axed some of their "Touch Apps" for tablets. In particular, they "will no longer be updating Adobe Debut, Adobe Collage, Adobe Proto, or the Android versions of Adobe Ideas and Adobe Kuler". Read more about this decision here. Obviously, tablets are great for content consumption. But in my opinion, people are still trying to sort out what content creation tasks tablets are good for. These apps may have been ahead of their time. Note that Adobe is continuing to develop Adobe Photoshop Touch and the iOS version of Adobe Ideas, as well as Adobe Revel.

3. Microsoft has phased out its Expression suite of Web and design-oriented tools. See the explanation from Microsoft here. According to this excellent article at ArsTechnica, "Microsoft is essentially ending the development of any tooling that is oriented at design professionals rather than developers".

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Em Software has just released InData 2.0 for InDesign CS5-6. According to the company this update "along with various accumulated fixes and improvements, finally adds full support for text anchors, hyperlinks and cross-references."

I've used previous versions of this valuable InDesign plug-in for several projects, and can vouch for its usefulness. It's best described as "mail merge on steroids". If you've tried the Data Merge feature of InDesign, but have been hampered by its limitations, you'll love InData. It's particularly useful for publishing directories from database information, without having to learn how to use InDesign's XML features.

Of course, if you need training on how to use InData, or consulting help with an InData project, I can do that too! Contact me if you'd like to talk about this.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

If you create apps with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, you come to rely heavily on Adobe's various Web services for building, previewing, and publishing apps. Adobe just released a Web site that displays the status of various DPS services. See status.adobedps.com. This will be really helpful!

Thursday, December 06, 2012

As a side business, I've partnered with Steve Harmon, a talented local designer and artist based in White Bear Lake, MN, to help him sell his artwork. We've created a full e-commerce Web site (hdistudios.com) containing over 60 products so far: prints, notecards and books.

I'd be honored if you'd take a look at the products on the Web site. This is an easy way to do some Holiday shopping without leaving home. The Web site has fully secure shopping cart capability, so you can complete your transaction with your credit card right on the site and your items will be shipped to your home.

Purchase a print or some notecards for yourself or a loved one, and know that your purchase benefits a local artist and entrepreneur!

Since this is a blog devoted to publishing and graphic design technology, some of you may be interested to know the platform behind the Web site. The entire site was created using the Adobe Business Catalyst platform and Adobe Dreamweaver. Adobe Business Catalyst makes managing the product inventory, the shopping cart system, and the credit card processing fairly easy.

Monday, December 03, 2012

I was notified today of a free on-line service that looks interesting: A free Microsoft Publisher to PDF conversion service. See publishertopdf.com.

I haven't tried this, but am keeping a link to it for the couple-of-times-year occasion when someone sends me a Microsoft Publisher file that I need to either just look at, or worse, convert to InDesign.